And We’re Back!

As 1P5 has grown, so too have our technical needs and costs. The time had come to move our website to a new host, which meant a “migration” of all of our content to a new server.

We waited until an evening when we knew we wouldn’t be publishing anything new. We pushed all the buttons. We pulled all the levers. We jiggled the flux capacitor to make sure it was producing the necessary 1.21 jigawatts.

Everything was going just swimmingly. We tested the new copy of the site and everything was working fine. And then we got to the point of updating the DNS records — the things that tell your web browser where to look on the Internet to find our website. And since a record update takes time to go into effect as DNS servers around the world eventually refresh their information, we made sure the process was started, then went to bed.

And woke up this morning to many concerned messages about the website being down. Some feared that we had been hacked. (I thought I saw an albino assassin sneaking through my room, but it turned out it was just my own pale reflection in the bathroom mirror. I need to spend more time in the sun.)

After a long session with tech support this morning, we found the source of the error, got things corrected, got our security certificates up to snuff (I don’t really know what that means either) and are back online — and hopefully better than ever. Our new servers should be running at even higher efficiency than the older, more expensive ones. The site appears responsive and images and pages are loading quickly.

In other words: IT’S ALIVE!

I apologize for the outage. But the way I see it, it gave us all a chance to imagine what it’d be like if 1P5 went away for real.

Which reminds me: we just kicked off our May fundraiser. If this morning’s outage bothered you, please consider dropping a few coins in the bucket. (Can you tell I used to work in PR? Never miss the upside in a bad story!) We can only do this with your support.

Steve Skojec is the Founding Publisher and Executive Director of OnePeterFive.com. He received his BA in Communications and Theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2001. His commentary has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Crisis Magazine, EWTN, Huffington Post Live, The Fox News Channel, Foreign Policy, and the BBC. Steve and his wife Jamie have seven children.